Marketing advices for VR developers

Getting new users to use or purchase your app can be really hard, especially in young markets like the VR eco-system. This section aims at helping you solve this problem. To start, we are excited to let you know that the first advanced VR Advertising Network as launched, it’s named vruzz.com and will help you advertise in VR directly to reach more VR users!

Hello everyone! We wrote this guide to help developers market their VR educational experiences, feel free to share it or to contact us to help us improve it.

Pre-Launch Announcement

We see more and more developers using pre-launch announcements to create interests in their work before the release of the app. This strategy can be really useful to create an early interest list. Unimersiv allows developers to publish their VR educational experiences as “coming soon” experiences to help them build this early interest list.

An early interest list as multiple benefits:

  • Do early marketing and build anticipation for your VR experience
  • Find out how many people are interested in your concept (are people ready to pay for this?)
  • Have a customer base already in place when you publish your VR experience (incredibly useful for email marketing)
vr-marketing-advices-developers

Don’t forget to market your Virtual Reality app!

How can I build an early interest list?

To build this early list, you will need something to the capture email addresses of the users interested in your experience (a Unimersiv “coming-soon” page lets you do that). You should also add a form on your website to allow interested visitors to sign up to your newsletter.

The first thing to do then is to publish an announcement on your social media channels and across relevant online forums:

I’m thrilled to announce that my experience explaining World War II in virtual reality will be available in March! If you’d like to be notified when the experience is available, enter your email here.

Then, link them to your email capture form.

You should continue to spread the word and invite people to join your list up until a few days before launching your VR experience. Then, on launch day, send your list a promotion code, bonus, or whatever you promised them!

Your app landing page

Your landing page (on Unimersiv or on any other app store) is your most important asset to generate downloads. It needs to be perfectly optimized. On Unimersiv, there are three main criteria that you can leverage to get users to download your app.

  • The first one is SCREENSHOTS. Screenshots (especially for VR experiences) are really important to stand out from other apps, they need to be chosen carefully. On Unimersiv, the first image uploaded is the one that will show up in search results, it is generally a good idea to integrate the app logo on this screenshot. Egyptian Mysteries is a good example:
  • Second, your APP’S INTRODUCTION (the line right under the name of your app on your listing) is also really important. It is your chance to explain to the users browsing our platform why they need to check your page. It is also important for SEO purposes (it might be a good idea to integrate some keywords in your intro). House of languages’ introduction is great:

    Learn Spanish or German with your Gear VR

  • Third, the FULL DESCRIPTION of your app is of course a key factor regarding its success. The first three lines are especially really important, use them to repeat the most important information. If your app have been reviewed in the press you should quote them in your description. Finally, be careful of typos and grammatical errors!

The first 30 days

The first 30 days after you publish your app are really important. If someone is interested in what you built, he needs to know that your app exists! We’ve been impressed by some of the tactics used by our developers to advertise their apps and we decided to present you the best ones.

The best tactics to advertise your Virtual Reality app

  • Email – Email is a marketing technique that is frequently underated. When done right, emails are an incredible tool to market your VR experience. It is, most of the time, the highest converting channels in term of sales.That’s why it is so important for you to build your own email list. The key to succesful email marketing is to include a special coupon (see coupons) with an incentive for your email subscribers and a deadline for them to use it. One last tip, you should includea a link to your VR experience page on Unimersiv in your email signature.
  • Website – Optimize your website or blog to generate new email subscribers and add our button (see button) to your website.Write a blog post announcing the launch of your VR experience and share it across your social media profiles.
  • Social Media – Social Media channels can be extremely useful in your marketing strategy, especially for virtual reality. There are some incredible online community dedicated to VR that would love to hear about your work. You should definitely introduce your experience to them but don’t spam!Here are some of the largest and most useful online communities we know: the Oculus subreddit, theVirtual Reality subreddit, the Facebook groups Virtual Reality and Oculus Rift (VR Headset). Share some screenshots, videos are simply a text post explaining what you are building and listen to their feedback.Another strategy to create initial interest in your work is to share with your followers on Twitter or Facebook a dedicatedd coupon with a great promotion to get access to your VR experience. This will help you create loyal followers.
  • Events – Presenting your work in targeted events is a great way to find future users and press! We advise you to go to meetup.com and find a VR event near you where you could demo your work.

We write about the use of Virtual Reality for non-gaming applications.